Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes

We know Winston Churchill as the most outstanding political and statesmanlike figure, a fighter against Nazism, and, at last, a Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. In a 2002 BBC poll, the English voted him the greatest Briton in history.

But above all, Churchill was a man of his time—and thus a passionate defender of the British Empire and the imperial idea. It is precisely this side of his political activity—without which Churchill’s portrait would be incomplete—that the well-known British-Pakistani writer, historian, publicist, and public figure Tariq Ali turns to. As head of the British fleet during the First World War, Churchill made a number of catastrophic mistakes that cost thousands of lives. His attempt to crush Irish nationalists left wounds that have not healed to this day.

Even the most revered period of Churchill’s political career—when the war was against Nazi Germany—was marked by famine in Bengal that took the lives of more than three million Indians, clashes between British troops and Greece’s People’s Liberation Army, and other “dark pages,” which are documented in detail in Tariq Ali’s book.